A Place Forgotten: Johnson-Hill Cemetery

Click here to read an article I came across a while back.

It raises the possibility that there are one or more abandoned cemeteries on the hill above Havre de Grace. It seems hard to believe considering the saturation of residential development in the area. A friend who grew up in town convinced me that there could be any number of lost burial grounds from the Civil War era located between Havre de Grace and Darlington.

In a little patch of brush on the side of Chapel Road, in the comfort provided by some old trees, sits the place I believe to be Johnson-Hill Cemetery. Some of you are familiar with it, possibly from your youths. Others would be as surprised as I was to learn that abandoned burial sites lie, hidden from view, in the shadows cast by one of the county's most prized communities.

The burial ground is marred by the eerie depressions formed when wooden caskets decay. Some of the grave sites are marked by etched tombstones, some are proudly distinguished by natural stones of varying sizes, most are recognizable only by sunken earth. A fair number of people are buried there.

A tall tree, possibly a source of shade and peacefulness in the past, now encroaches upon the grave of Civil War soldier Luis Hill. Luis rests next to his father James. Josephine, the young bride of Freeborn Curtis, was barely 21 years old when laid to rest in the little cemetery on Chapel Hill. She died in the year after the Civil War ended. We can only imagine the dignity felt by a black man named Freeborn during that ugly time. It says much about the people who lived here then.

The Ghosts of Havre de Grace began as a project to collect haunted stories about the area. It still is with one important distinction: I've leaned that the real ghosts of Havre de Grace are the remarkable people and places whose memories have regrettably faded in time, but are not entirely forgotten.

The Most Gruesome Night

Gravediggers working with shovels in darkness to unearth caskets, disrupting the sleep of the dead: Could it be the faint memory of a distant childhood nightmare? Could it be the faded recollection of a horrific tale heard long ago?

It happened during the early morning hours of June 25, 1929 at Angel Hill Cemetery in the quiet town of Havre de Grace.

In the dim light cast by a full moon behind low clouds, M. H. Andrews, superintendent of Angel Hill Cemetery, his son, Clifford and two laborers carried out the grisly task at hand. To avoid frenzied crowds of townsfolk, 3 AM was the designated hour to exhume the bodies of Edward Stone and Edgar Stone, the deceased husband and son of Hattie Stone.

Hattie, in the custody of authorities at the time, was the target of a murder investigation that pointed to the intentional poisoning of her 15 year old son, George, who had died a couple of weeks earlier. Edgar had passed away two years before his brother; Edward had been dead just a year and a half. All three, at the time of their deaths, presented symptoms suggesting they had been poisoned with strychnine. The authorities wanted to know if the rumors circulating around town were true: Did Hattie Stone murder her family?

As might be expected, the bizarre case drew the intense focus of media attention.

The caskets were taken by undertakers George and Robert Pennington, father and son, to their funeral parlor in town. George Pennington was then the mayor of Havre de Grace. The viscera (internal organs) were removed from the corpses to be delivered to Baltimore for chemical analysis.

The caskets were swiftly returned to Angel Hill where they were placed back in the earth, next to George's grave, while the town still slept.